by Brian Brett
After Jackson died we didn’t want any more horses, but a few years later we ended up with both a horse and a tractor when our kindly neighbours moved away. La-Barisha, a glamorous Arabian grey, reminds me of a fading beauty queen. She thinks she’s God’s gift to horses, and the smug expression on her face when she’s having her hooves trimmed is so arrogant I tease her about “having her nails done” and promise to paint them red one day.
THE COW’S TONGUE IS just as amazing as the tongue of the horse or the sheep, meatier yet equally sensitive. Cow tongue is also one of my favourite meats. A boiled tongue, peeled and thinly sliced onto a hunk of homemade rye bread with good mustard, is a disappearing delicacy. Fifty years ago it was a common lunch meat, but times have changed. Betty, our sole cow, had a tongue that looked a yard long, and she could lap a bucket clean, along with your hands and anything else that tasted good, and she could savour a pasture the way a gourmet can savour a good sauce or a bottle of wine.
With its near-supernatural tasting skills, a cow can lick the air and analyze the protein content of a pasture, the acidity and the alkalinity of grasses and clovers, and what part of the field is in its prime. Cattle, like horses and sheep, change their diet depending upon the time of day and the season because the protein content in grass changes according to sunlight, moisture, and heat through the year. The cow’s olfactory world is so complex it’s difficult to understand for simple-minded creatures like ourselves, but some organic farmers are learning to be grass farmers, as farmers once were—smelling the grass in the morning and the evening, looking for colour gradation and the shapes of the stem. It’s easy to tell when a fence is broken but a lot more difficult to know when a pasture is broken and how to fix it. These New Age farmers might not be as smart about grass as a cow, but they are attempting to learn from their cattle—as well as reinventing traditional practices of cross-fencing and tending to the health of mixed grass, only with more scientific finesse. This way their cattle will inevitably become cheaper to raise and certainly healthier than the abused prisoners of the modern feedlot.
During the twentieth century agriculture shifted away from traditional practice and adopted the production efficiencies of the factory—raising cattle on minimum pasture and feeding them hay, grain, and silage. The cattle are then “finished” in feedlots where, as most people know by now, up to a hundred thousand cattle are imprisoned in obscenely filthy enclosures—sometimes knee deep in excrement—and are given corn-based feed, which acidifies their stomachs and provides a perfect host environment for the toxic bacterium E. coli O157:H7, the poisonous, deadly child of the feedlots.
Once the cattle are fat enough, their muscles slackening from disuse, they are shipped to slaughterhouses that resemble medieval torture chambers, where they are sliced open and cleaned, usually by immigrant labourers in the United States, people with the courage and desperation to work in these horror houses. The unrelenting assembly lines force the workers to clean and gut up to a steer a minute. Anyone who has ever gutted a steer knows how insane that is. It often leads to accidental piercing of the stomach and the spraying of shit and intestines and their bacteria all over the meat. By the time we see that steer it’s washed and wrapped in plastic. The bacteria aren’t necessarily eliminated. Then we eat it.
CONSIDER LIVE STOCK FEED. OR IGINALLY it was pasture. As grain grew more common the farm industrialized. Then mixed-grain feeds came along. They were soon manufactured with animal by-products and mineral supplements and hormones. Unnaturally elevating the protein, fat, and starch levels can create larger livestock faster. It didn’t matter that many of the ingredients—such as bones, feathers, blood, fish, canola oil, enzymes, soy meal, antibiotics, and alfalfa—were not part of the livestock’s original diet, which is why b se suddenly broke out. Feeding beef and other livestock by-products to beef is now banned. Yet when the outbreak first occurred in Britain, there were so many millions of tons of feed in circulation that the feed mills cleverly recalled and reprocessed the contaminated feed into chicken and pork feed, because chickens and pigs have yet to show symptoms of bse. A dangerous economic decision that worked in that case, but do we want to trust these companies?
Antibiotics in feed constitute up to 70 percent of North America’s consumption of these drugs. Owing to the growing wave of revulsion, the use of animal by-products and antibiotics is diminishing, but animal While these feeds reduce the time enhanced livestock to market, they are term coined by Ronald Wright. Simplistically that what appear to be good ideas often become evolutionary dead ends. Some livestock less healthy and too fat, and environmental damage and disease. That’s The big question is, Where do you draw is good feed? This is difficult because the environmental, and health issue—not merely one. How can you legislate that? Or common nutritional knowledge is constantly changing, are difficult to enforce—unknown material to rendering factories despite the current legislation.
I feed our livestock good pasture, the appropriate grain, ground or whole. industrial feed production has led to increasing of regular grain, since the feed companies, of modern breakfast cereals, from processed feeds. Relatively few farmers now use traditional feed.
Progress traps that arise out of modern structures can lead to strange results. The reasons for the foot-and-mouth panic in Great Britain were economic. They had little to do with the health of humans or animals. Foot-and-mouth is a nasty disease—a livestock version of measles. But it goes away in a few weeks, and then the animal is safe to slaughter. Nor will its immune system be susceptible to same variant of the disease (there are several strains) again. However, if you are holding fifty thousand feeder pigs in a factory, calculating daily the digestible protein and fat ratio pouring into the rotors that distribute feed to the troughs, time is essential to the financial equation. Slaughterhouse delivery is calibrated to the exact hour. A twenty-four-hour delay would make tens of thousands of animals unprofitable. A longer delay would mean economic collapse for the factories. That’s why the British agriculture bureaucrats ordered the slaughter of everyone’s livestock in the affected regions, not just those produced by the factory farms. The enormous carnage and the great heaps of burning corpses, including endangered varieties of livestock, were a symbol of profit protection, not safety.
BETTY WAS A JERSEY-HEREFORD cross—Hereford for the meat and Jersey for the bountiful milk to nurse a calf. She was a cow bred to raise a hefty dinner. She even came with a good calf, and the plan was to raise her calves for meat— one a year. Alas, Betty had a different plan. It consisted of eating everything in sight. Cattle, understandably, don’t like being tied up. Mike used to tie his Jersey cow to his truck bumper and milk her. Then he sold the cow to a good friend, a knowledgeable farmer, and when Mike told him he just tied the cow to the bumper, his friend did the same, ensuring she was double-tight by tying her hind leg to the back bumper. He had a new, expensive pickup and didn’t want to take chances. Maybe that was the fatal mistake. The cow decided she didn’t like the arrangement, or the new truck—whatever—and started bucking. She flipped off the back hobble and kicked the shine right out of his truck, ornamenting it with her personal hoofprint design from bumper to bumper.
Betty had similar feelings about the split-rail fencing between her and the orchard and soon was ginger-stepping between the rails and reaching for the lower branches of the fruit trees. Once she’d wrecked our cross-fencing to her satisfaction, she settled into eating everything she could reach. Thankfully, she didn’t crack the higher fencing that kept her in the field.
Betty was a cranky cow, according to her next owner, but I got along with her fine once I rebuilt the fences stronger. I milked her every morning in the field where I’d dug a deep hole and stuck a post in it. When the early light fell on the land I’d bring her a bucket of feed, and she’d mosey up to the feed and start eating while I clipped her to the post, pulled up a chunk of firewood for a stool, and began milking her. She’d munch contentedly until I had our pail of milk. Sometimes, I’d
hand-whip the milk of summer into a rich, golden butter that has forever given me contempt for that dyed, silver-foil-wrapped trash in the dairy section of the supermarkets. You can practically get stoned on real Jersey milk, especially in early summer (real milk and butter change flavour according to the season), when it’s so rich and real, but, of course, it’s illegal to sell anymore.
A friend, an Anglican priest on Pender Island, has in his possession a hundred-year-old letter from his great-grandfather in Scotland. The man was writing to a relative about his eighteen dead children, how he walked miles across the hills to a meadow and hand-scythed hay to provide a good supply for the family cow during winter, so it could deliver enough milk to feed and strengthen the young bairns who kept dying on him and his wife. It never occurred to him that the cow had tuberculosis and he was slaving to feed the tubercular milk to his children. Tuberculosis can be a dangerous business—though it’s now nearly extinct in cattle. Despite the tragedy of that Scottish farmer a century ago, enthusiasts claim today’s well-handled “wild milk” is far more healthful and less dangerous than a drive to the corner store.
HISTORICALLY, THE MIXTURE OF animals and humans on small farms provided opportunities for immune systems to interact on modest levels—with a few virulent exceptions (almost all caused by the unhygienic conditions provided by war, famine, or overpopulation). Unfortunately, in a bizarre way, the domesticated animals used by Native Americans— llamas, dogs, guinea pigs, turkeys—didn’t have immune systems that allowed bacteria and viruses to leap into the human species as easily as the more agreeable immune systems of Eurasian livestock like sheep, goats, cattle, chickens, horses, and especially pigs—whose digestive infrastructure is so similar to the human gut. As a result, Native Americans were overwhelmed by diseases introduced by the European invaders.
Edward Jenner has been rightly praised for noting that milkmaids who’d encountered cowpox never caught the much nastier smallpox. However, it’s been claimed that while inoculating people with the pustules from cowpox in cattle, he also, unknowingly, transferred tuberculosis, as well as the syphilis virus, which moved from maids to cattle when the cuts on their hands met up with cuts or wounds on the udders of cows. Although the smallpox vaccine saved millions of lives, the rate of syphilis infections in children skyrocketed, along with tuberculosis, which killed Jenner’s wife, son, and two sisters. As so often happens when the scientific method arrives at the small farm, a beautiful monster had likely emerged, combining immunity and infection in its early days.
With Betty long gone, I have to search out raw milk—a secretive endeavour for most old-style islanders, who love the real world and accept its dangers. Raw and unprocessed milk becomes more difficult to find each year as small farms disappear. Also, the milk police are becoming shiftier, and they masquerade as friends of friends and go around to farmers and tell them a neighbour sent them over for some milk. If a farmer relents and gives them raw milk, she will be busted for her generosity. Underground milk has become like the drug world, a kingdom of whispers, politics, and draconian policing.
Pasteurization, although it doesn’t totally sterilize milk, eliminates potentially bad bacteria, protozoa, moulds, and yeasts as well as good bacteria. There’s a growing revolt against it for just that reason, with enthusiasts declaring that the rise of autoimmune diseases parallels the elimination of real milk. This interesting argument, it should be noted, is also used against several other food processes that appeared during the past century. The worst legacy of pasteurization is that, like most initially plausible farming schemes, it’s been captured by industrial production economies whose main purpose is to increase profit and reduce perishability (milk can last up to three or four months after some processes) at the expense of quality. This is why milk products no longer go deliciously sour; today’s commercial milk rots. Homogenization, which somehow snuck into the pasteurization process, destroys the cream’s structure, allowing it to be watered down. All pasteurized and homogenized commercial milk is watered. Manufacturers blithely claim the water is added “accidentally” during processing.
Even more strangely, people want their milk watery and defatted these days because they eat too much fat at the fast-food restaurant down the street, and thus they’d rather sacrifice the healthy qualities of real milk and its thick, sweet cream rising to the top of the glass bottles that we all used to keep floating in our cool streams and wells before the days of refrigeration.
When I was twenty-two I lived on Texada Island a few miles from an enormous woman who sold wild milk. I’d saunter along in the heat of summer down to her farm and buy a jar of cold milk from her cellar. The top third would be cream. I never had the heart to shake the milk and distribute the cream evenly. I would suck it up off the top, delirious from its rich fat, and then cleanse my palate with the thinner milk at the bottom. My favourite time for buying her milk was when the wild strawberries were out, and the neighbours would encounter me, moustached with cream, sitting on the roadside, picking at the tiny strawberries, which were more addictive than the milk. The neighbours would laugh and wave as they drove by, and I would smile a big, milky, strawberry smile while the dragonflies partitioned the air and the crickets clacked in the meadows.
9
MORE STOCK
EVERY FARM HAS its specialty, but a truly mixed farm like ours needs various creatures, made of leaf or flesh, to become an organic whole, not only for my lunch today but for sales and healthy cultivation. Like the few surviving mixed farms on Salt Spring we raise sheep. Salt Spring lamb is world renowned, and though the taste difference is obvious, I always wondered what accounted for that difference, so I asked the Byrons. Mike told me it was the diet of Gulf Islands vegetation. The majority of factory-style lamb operations run their lambs on big, grass pastures, especially in New Zealand. Salt Spring lambs historically have been raised on small farms of mixed shrub land, orchards, mahonia, ferns, and pasture—bush lambs. Apart from a few big farms, the local farms usually raised between a half-dozen and twenty almost hilariously babied ewes until the government regulated island sheep into near-oblivion in order to make them better. The bureaucrats told local farmers they’d help us improve our traditional butchering. We soon recognized this meant we were doomed. At Trauma Farm we kept ten ewes, and produced about fifteen lambs a year, until the new slaughtering legislation ensured we’d lose more money than we could afford. We had to shrink our flock to a half-dozen ewes to manage the pasture. Many farms gave up altogether.
FARMERS HAVE MADE a few mistakes with sheep bloodlines, breeding stupidity into a once-brilliant animal, along with docility. I often say sheep have to be smart to be that dumb, and a sadness invades me when a young ram stupidly butts at the food bucket. Still, sheep are impressively intelligent in certain ways. Like horses and cows, they’re artists when it comes to the qualities of grass. They might crap indiscriminately, but they also avoid grazing near potentially parasite-laden excrement. In late winter they will suddenly attack tree bark and branches and foliage they scorned all year, because they can sense their own mineral or enzyme deficiencies. A British study proved that sheep can recognize over fifty friends among their flock, a striking number when I consider my own hopeless ineptitude at recalling a casual friend’s name. They know their society. The same study tentatively showed that rams prefer to mate with ewes that resemble their mother, but I won’t go there. In another study, only of people, the extended family typically comprised around twenty of us. That’s the closeness zone of our species. The village, a hundred or so people, is about the most we are capable of becoming acquainted with socially. Everyone else is a stranger, and our species has a long history of disliking strangers, the aliens who live in the next valley. What’s really scary about this cultural behaviour is that it has many parallels with the social structure of the sheep in our field.
DOMESTICATED LIVE STOCK CAN PROVIDE their share of comedy. Our favourite ewe was Butterball, a Hampshire cross with unlimited patience and a be
nevolent, really dumb expression. One day, at feeding time, she got her head stuck in the bucket while I was distracted by the dogs. We happened to have our camera handy, so we now possess a photograph of a bucket-headed Butterball. She’s standing, bucket upright, surrounded by the other ewes staring at her as if she were an alien. She started walking around blindly, so the rest of the flock fled in horror. She followed their fleeing footsteps, crashing often as we dived and skidded after her, until we caught up and yanked the bucket off her head.
Shortly after we arrived we’d bought a classic island herd, all mixed and scrambled, and we have been mixing them more ever since. Cheviots and Suffolks and Dorsets and Romneys and Jacobs. Our first ram was a gentle Romney and we named him Romeo. When the ewes went into heat he’d stand behind them and kiss the air, making cheesy pornographic gestures with his lips. Over the years we bought a few black sheep and bred them into our gang. Since we weren’t going to make any money on sheep, we decided we might as well have the amusement of a flock of black sheep.
The problem with a small flock is keeping a viable ram. You want to avoid inbreeding, so island farmers naturally developed an irregular system of ram exchanges. If someone has a good ram, it might become community property. After the ram has finished with all the ewes on the original farm, you take it, feed it, maintain it, and then pass it on. This process can involve a skewed breeding season, but in our temperate climate that doesn’t matter. Moving the ram becomes a social event. Dinners and wine are often involved. It can also get dicey.
